Breakout Sessions

Models and practices (10:40am - 11:40am)

Creating connections & increasing engagement

Improve teaching without changing your syllabus

For faculty, instructors, academic professionals, and studentsThis session will highlight easily adoptable and adaptable practices for enhancing your teaching (and evaluations). Examples from experienced faculty will be discussed and strategies for implementation will be explored in this interactive session.

How to fail successfully

For faculty and instructorsGood teaching involves challenging students and, occasionally, adjusting and challenging one's methods. Hear about times when colleagues have taken big risks in their teaching; risks that sometimes led to successes and sometimes not. Discuss how you can try new things in your teaching and ensure that even a failure can be a success.

Looking beyond Harvard: The teaching evaluations landscape

For faculty, instructors, and academic professionalsHow do other universities handle teaching evaluations? Join us for a guided tour of examples. The instruments in use can be blunt or overly complex. Practices include home-grown surveys, national instruments such as IDEA, focus groups, interviews, faculty self-evaluations, inter-faculty sharing, narrative analysis, and student-led crowd-sourcing. How do different organizations navigate the options? We will discuss current trends in assessment of teaching effectiveness and highlight ideas that may be transferable to Harvard.

Which decision-making practices promote excellent teaching?

For faculty, academic administrators, and other academic decision-makers Designed as an open discussion to share views and experiences across Harvard schools, participants will compare practices in educational decision-making, and discuss how variations in practices lead to different incentives, curricular structures, and levels of commitment to teaching and learning. What criteria are used for approving new courses and how is coherence maintained over time? What is the best way to introduce the value of teaching excellence to new faculty and then reinforce throughout a faculty member’s career? What are the “carrots” and “sticks” and “pressure points” that are effective in a research university setting? Facilitators will guide the discussion to promote information sharing, brainstorming, and idea generation.

Ideas and innovations (11:50am - 12:50pm)

Emerging approaches to evaluating learning

For faculty, instructors, and academic professionalsThis session will explore both emerging trends in evaluating student learning and connections between evaluating learning and evaluating teaching. The conversation will be anchored by two thought-provoking case studies from different Harvard contexts.

Getting the most out of faculty & staff partnerships

For faculty, instructors, and academic professionals Faculty and staff are busy people, and when they do not have the opportunity to learn about each other’s expertise, it is all too easy for their partnerships to become purely transactional: faculty have a question or encounter a problem, and staff help them resolve it. Universities, however, are meant to be places for experimentation, exploration, and transformation. This session will showcase some exemplary partnerships that have proven effective, and ask the audience to engage in a short exercise to imagine how best to design—and pitch—their ideal partnership.

Making the most of student evaluations

For faculty, instructors, and academic professionals This interactive session will focus on student evaluations of teaching from a developmental (formative) – rather than evaluative (summative) – perspective to explore how student feedback can improve classroom instruction. As a group, we will (1) reflect on student input that participants would find most valuable; (2) share and discuss diverse approaches to soliciting this input, which extend beyond end-of-term evaluations; and (3) engage with short cases to practice interpreting and utilizing student feedback. Participants will leave the session with practical tools for leveraging student evaluations to improve teaching.

Stories of effective and ineffective evaluations of teaching

For faculty, instructors and students This session is designed to engage our students in a discussion of effective and ineffective evaluations of teaching. We’ll hear from students across the university about their experiences with giving faculty feedback on their teaching. Students’ stories will address questions such as: how have faculty solicited feedback; was student feedback addressed and what impact did this have on their learning; what are the most and least effective modes of soliciting feedback that they have experienced; and how the use of evaluations have impacted their learning overall? Attendees will be challenged to consider modes of evaluation used in their own teaching and how they might modify these to better access and respond to student feedback, with the goal of improving learning outcomes for all students.